Obama looking for a reset button with staff changes?

posted at 2:55 pm on September 23, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

The Washington Post hears rumors of a staff sweep in the West Wing — and rumblings of discontent within President Obama’s party. The presumed departure of Rahm Emanuel for the mayoral race in Chicago and the exits of economists Christine Romer and Larry Summers may mean a sweeping round of resignations and new appointments. But will it mean opening up the White House to new, fresh perspectives in an attempt to regain good will — or a circling of the wagons in tighter, leftward motion?

Obama will soon lose other top advisers. His chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, announced that he will return to Harvard, where he is a professor; Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina is expected to join Axelrod in Chicago; and national security adviser James L. Jones is said to want out by the end of the year.

Some former aides and allies of the president expressed hope that Obama will take advantage of the departures – which are common at the two-year point in any presidency – to bring in outsiders who will challenge the president’s current team.

“They miscalculated where people were out in the country on jobs, on spending, on the deficit, on debt,” said a longtime Democratic strategist who works with the White House on a variety of issues. “They have not been able to get ahead of any of it. And it’s all about the insularity. Otherwise how do you explain how a group who came in with more goodwill in decades squandered it?” The strategist asked not to be identified in order to speak freely about the president and his staff.

Insularity is a fancy word for losing touch with the electorate, and that much has been obvious since the big push for ObamaCare started in 2009. Emanuel reportedly warned against getting stuck in an almost interminable debate, but the rest of the White House apparently didn’t see the dangers. That makes the Post’s predictions for replacements rather interesting:

But Obama might not look too far beyond the walls of the White House in his search for new advisers. In the pervasive but often unreliable Washington guessing game, the names most often heard are already familiar to the president:Tom Donilon, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, is thought to be a leading contender either for Emanuel’s job or for Jones’s post. Donilon and Obama became close during the 2008 campaign, when he was in charge of prepping the candidate for debates.

Senior adviser Pete Rouse is another possible choice to replace Emanuel. He served as Obama’s chief of staff in the Senate. Other possible candidates include Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, who was the president’s personal attorney before he joined the administration last year; Phil Schiliro, who runs Obama’s congressional liaison office; and former Senate majority leaderTom Daschle, a close Obama ally.

Anne Kornblut and Scott Wilson note that Obama’s choices of replacements have a common thread: they’re Obama insiders. Elizabeth Warren and Austan Goolsbee, two of the most recent appointments, are both inner-circle Obamaites. More importantly, they are almost certain to reinforce the decisions already made by this administration rather than offer heterodox points of view and proposals. The same can be said of the candidates noted above for the upcoming vacancy for chief of staff.

Democratic strategist Peter Fenn says that “this is the way Kennedy worked,” sticking with a small circle of close advisers, but that strategy only works when the advice given succeeds. Kennedy didn’t squander an immense level of popularity in less than two years, though, nor did he extend a recession and a post-recession malaise with bad economic policies as Obama has done. Democrats should worry about insularity. This administration is desperately in need of a reset button.

Blowback

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HECK, even this group of hacks do not want to go down in History as the worst administration under the WORST President .
Obvious answer here is that Republicans will take the HOUSE , and the rats are fleeing now , rather than face investigations and JAIL TIME.
Makes more sense to fell back to Chicago , where , for enough cash any criminal can walk the streets as a free man and do reality TV SHOWS

This all reminds me of meth. When meth gets into a home, it literally detroys the house from the inside. It gets into the wood and the sheet rock only from being cooked in the house, and one quick wash of walls reveals that meth is on the house. What obama is doing is he is going to try to paint over the meth in the house as if the American people will not see it, but one quick wash of his policies only brings it to light and shows that they do not change.

BTW, the only way to get rid of meth is to tear the house down and start from scratch. That is what we will need to do with obama in 2012. Tear down his house and put up the peoples house again

Considering Ms. Jarrett’s father was a member of the Chicago Community Party, I would say that Scooter is going to continue being exactly who he is right now. No Clinton-Moderate impersonation for him.

The real problem is that the ideological leader of this rat pack, the most extreme of all of them, is the lying top dog himself. That’s why it’s unlikely he’s going to bring on advisors with a significantly different worldview, unless he pulls a Nixon In China.

Jeez, Obama vomits from nervousness any time he has to do anything that might anger part of his base, and the angriest part of his base is on the left.

No way he moves to the right with any replacements for Rahm, Alexrod, etc., unless its simply a token appointee who will then be marginalized by the rest of the staff (that doesn’t mean the new brain trust won’t have Obama pretending to move to the right, by saying a few more moderate things. He’s just never going to actually sign any moderate legislation (and if the Dems hold the Senate, he’ll use a ‘good cop, bad cop’ strategy with Reid, Durbin or Schumer in the villain’s role).

One must assume that Mr. Obama’s first round of appointments constituted what he believed to be the first team. Now he faces the future surrounded by the second team. Moreover he is deep into the game and falling badly behind. This is a dangerous moment both for Mr. Obama and for the country. There is little evidence that he is likely to do well facing adversity particularly in the absence of his seemingly blindly devoted support system. Given his odd personality one wonders if he will be able to soldier through or if he will begin to decompensate psychologically. I’m guessing the latter. If so, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Who needs staff anyway when the Won-derworker waves his magic wand, the seas stop rising and the celestial choirs are singing? Hope-n-Change-n-Yes-we-can and bibbity bobbity boo, all your dreams come true!

C’mon this is a prank from MTV isn’t it? Ghoulsbee is running the economy, some guy names Ruse as the Chief of Staff and Phil “the Shill” Schiliro is going to be the liaison to congress. And really Bob (my wife Anita is a Mao-lovin lizard lady) Bauer… c’mon.

On a more serious note why doesn’t he just appoint Soros as Emperor and stop pretending he’s running things.

But if the Dems totally tank in November, Hillary is going to start weighing her options for 2012. She can leave in January w/out having a major screwup in foreign policy – not sure how long that will last however. Better get out to “spend more time with her family”.